Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

PMQs is a joke, and the world is laughing at us. Time to end it

Prime Minister’s Questions has jumped the shark. Yesterday it jumped a shark so large I half expected Richard Dreyfuss to rise from the back benches and demand why the Prime Minister had refused to close the beaches off Amity Island.

Perhaps it was the sight of Michael Fabricant sitting on the back benches wearing a giant fake moustache. Or the Prime Minister’s joke about Ed Miliband “loving Engels instead”, a reference to Miliband’s Desert Island discs choice of Robbie Williams song “Angels”, which contains the line “I’m loving angels instead”. Or the fact Labour’s leader didn’t have the wit or wisdom to inflict the mercy killing the pun so richly deserved, and instead spent his own time at the Dispatch Box rambling aimlessly from one issue to another.

Anyway, whatever it was, as I sat there delivering my instant Twitter verdict – “Appalling joke aside, Cameron skated through this one. Ed's PMQ's strategy seems to be to meander from one issue to another. Weird” – I suddenly thought “what is the point?” Not just “what is the point of me sending this tweet?” which would have been a legitimate thought in itself, but: “what is the point of PMQs?”

I’m a parliamentary traditionalist. I like all the arcane rules and the overbearing pomp and splendour. To me they act as a timely reminder that no individual is grander than the democratic process they are bound to serve.

I’ve always bought into the concept of PMQs as well; the idea that once a week the legislative gets to hold the executive to account. And it’s been said that if they had a similar system of PMQs in the United States, Watergate would have been uncovered much sooner, or may even have been prevented in the first place.

But it’s time to face facts. PMQs is no longer a parliamentary occasion, it’s a party political one. It is not a forum for intelligent scrutiny of the executive, but a partisan shooting gallery. And far from acting as a showcase for British parliamentary democracy, it’s making us look an international laughing stock.

Yesterday Bob Stewart asked the Prime Minister what action the Government would take over the Spanish government's continuing sabre-rattling over Gibraltar, which had lead to the opening of the British diplomatic bag. The Prime Minister said he thought this was an “extremely serious” issue. It’s not clear whether Michael Fabricant’s giant fake moustache was in shot at the time.

What precisely do we conduct PMQs for? It’s certainly not for the benefit of the electorate, who think the whole thing is a farce. In fact, this is one of the problems. Because the public have zero interest in PMQs, our politicians are now forced to deploy an array of contrived stunts and sound-bites to get themselves on the news bulletins. Which in turn alienates the voters even more. And so the whole vicious PMQs circle continues.

Nor is there any evidence the politicians actually get anything out of the process. Jim Callaghan regularly patronised and humiliated Margaret Thatcher during their PMQs jousts. Neil Kinnock used humour to undermine her during the second half of her leadership. William Hague bested Tony Blair just about every week. It didn’t make the slightest difference.

In fact, there is some evidence PMQs is actually the enemy of good government. Last month David Cameron rushed out his commitment to axing green bills and cutting energy prices primarily because he felt he had to have something to say in response to the attack he knew was coming at noon from Ed Miliband. And a fat lot of good it did him. Or the environment.

Then there’s the amount of time the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition spend preparing for their weekly dust-up behind the Westminster bike sheds. It takes up the best part of half a day, and frequently drags on into the evening. That’s about 10 per cent of David Cameron’s regular working week spent, not on dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat or the global economic crisis, but learning how to deliver rubbish jokes about a singer who used to be in Take That.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Mother of Parliaments, Bagehot's dignified government

The sole area where PMQs does make a tangible difference is in the morale of the respective parliamentary parties. But that effectively makes PMQs nothing more than a giant political placebo. And the only reason they affect morale is because they happen in the first place. If PMQs didn’t occur every week then the party leaders wouldn’t worry about them and then the backbenchers wouldn’t worry about them, and the impact on party morale would be precisely zero.

If we want scrutiny of the executive we can have it without the festival of banality that is PMQs. John Bercow has shown himself only too willing to drag ministers, from the PM down, to the chamber to deliver statements to the House on the important issues of the day. They give the opportunity for the government to set out their case in depth, for the opposition to conduct a detailed and forensic analysis of Minister’s responses, and for backbenchers of all sides to have their say free from the rabble-rousing that in unleashed at noon every Wednesday.

And if that’s not enough, then the House could set aside a monthly afternoon session in which the Prime Minister makes a detailed statement about the business of the proceeding four weeks, the Leader of the Opposition responds, and then the House has an opportunity for a comprehensive and wide ranging debate.

As it is, Prime Minister’s Questions has become a joke. A childish, self-indulgent in-joke. When the world saw Michael Fabricant’s moustache yesterday, it wasn’t laughing with us.